According to the employees, they were dismissed over the phone late on Thursday, following a lunchtime gathering they had planned on the company campus.
Microsoft recently fired two employees who organized a vigil at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to remember Palestinians killed amid Israel’s ongoing genocide on Gaza, the Associated Press reported.
According to the employees, they were dismissed over the phone late on Thursday, following a lunchtime gathering they had planned on the company campus.
AP reported that “both workers were members of a coalition of employees called ‘No Azure for Apartheid’ that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government.”
Tuesday’s event, however, was reportedly similar to other charitable campaigns organized within the company to aid communities in crisis.
Shame on you @Microsoft : MSFT fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza | AP News. Israel is an apartheid state, and opposing it is moral and just! #ApartheidIsrael #GazaHolocaust
— Nazeem 🍉🍉🍉 (@nazeem) October 26, 2024
Abdo Mohamed, a data scientist and one of the dismissed employees, told AP: “We have so many community members within Microsoft who have lost family, lost friends or loved ones.”
Mohamed criticized Microsoft for “failing to provide a space where we can come together and share our grief and honor the memories of people who can no longer speak for themselves.”
While Microsoft declined to discuss specifics, it confirmed that it had terminated some employees “in accordance with internal policy.”
Hossam Nasr, another employee who lost his position, explained that the vigil aimed to “honor the victims of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza and to call attention to Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide” due to its technology’s use by Israeli forces.
Nasr, a Harvard graduate and co-founder of Harvard Alumni for Palestine, noted that his views on the Gaza conflict had attracted controversy.
‘Genocide Profiteers’ – Google Fires 28 Employees Protesting Ties to Israel
This is not the first time employees at a major tech company have been affected.
Earlier this year, Google recently dismissed more than 50 workers involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a multi-billion dollar contract between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government for cloud computing and AI services.
In April, the termination came one day after nine Google workers were arrested following a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and California. This included a protest in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office.
The protests were led by No Tech for Apartheid, a movement of tech workers demanding Amazon and Google drop Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
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